Interview: Estique's Takayuki Komabayashi

Any shooter fan should give Changeable Guardian Estique some attention. That’s not merely because it’s technically astounding for something running on an actual Famicom or NES. And it’s not just because the staff includes luminaries from Compile’s best years as a shooter developer: Jemini Hirono, Daigattai Kodama, and Pac Fujishama, to use their pen names. It’s really because Estique is an impressive shooter. 

Numerous retro-styled shooters have blatant connections to genre classics, but Estique is harder to pin down. There are traces of Compile’s history about it, but other influeces lurk below the surface, from that Changeable ship itself to the simplified weapons to the game’s two diverging storylines across the Famicom and NES versions. There’s a lot going on here.

Estique debuted on modern platforms last month, with a physical release planned and Broke Studio still listing the NES and Famicom cartridges. That's why I decided to ask director Takayuki Komabayashi about just what went into Estique.

How did you initially come up with Estique?

I thought that my company should create an original game, and I wanted it to be a shooting game that was easy to play without those brutal surprises for first-time players.

And how did you become a fan of Compile?

When I played games on the Sega Mark III, the one I enjoyed the most was Maou Golvellius [aka Golvellius: The Valley of Doom].

Several former Compile staffers worked on Estique, but it also seems inspired by other games besides Compile shooters. The transforming robot is similar to the mecha in Thexder and its sequel Fire Hawk, which you’ve mentioned as favorite games of yours. What do you like about the transforming concept?

I like robot shooting games, but I thought the gameplay might not work if the robot’s hitbox was always taller than a ship, so I decided to go with a transformation system.

 

The title Estique is an anagram of Equites, an Alpha Denshi arcade game that you have also mentioned as a favorite. Equites is somewhat obscure compared to Thexder and other classic shooters, and Equites is also a vertical shooter instead of a horizontal shooter like Estique. Can you tell us a little about why you like Equites? And how did it inspire the gameplay of Estique?

Equites is highly praised for its heavy, rich sound as well as its responsive gameplay and tight feel. Since Equites is a vertical shooter, that aspect didn’t really influence the gameplay itself in Estique, but it still has a connection to the NES version's settings.

Estique's method of briefly powering up the ship or robot’s weapons is interesting. What was your inspiration for that?

Is it because there’s no step-by-step power system? I don’t like step-by-step power-ups in shooting games.

There are lots of nostalgic references in Estique, especially in the soundtrack. For example, why did you include the Gunkan March?

I like the Gunkan March from Parodius Da! so I asked Satoshi Fujishima [aka "Pac"] to make it the first track in the prototype version’s sound production. Regarding the ported version, our company suggested playing it when the game language is set to Japanese, but it was removed based on the publisher's decision.

By the way, our adventure game Hyper Euphoria, which recreates the style of 80s Japanese PC games and was released by a different publisher, does play the Gunkan March too.

On that note, Hyper Euphoria is currently available on Steam in Japanese. Are there any plans to translate it?

The Japanese text is highly idiosyncratic and filled with inside jokes. Due to the high cost of translation, I do not think an English version will be released.

What inspired Mary and Kanon, the pilots drawn by Daigattai Kodama? Are their names references to anything in particular?

We didn’t specifically decide on any references in the character designs or the names, so they’re supposed to be original characters.

Estique sends Mary and Kanon around the world, complete with vacation photos after each stage. How did you choose the cities they visit? 

Japan, the U.S., and the U.K. are major places. I like Hong Kong, and Germany was chosen because there was a possibility of developing it for a German publisher.

Why do the Famicom and NES versions of the game have different cutscenes and, in essence, different storylines? For example, the ending to the Famicom version implies some romantic attraction between Mary and Kanon, but that does not come up in the NES version. Was that a joke about how NES games were sometimes censored compared to Famicom games?

I thought the NES version had to give the impression of "English written by Japanese people doing their best" as well as a different story and setting. Also, since I know there are people who don’t like silly stories, I wanted to provide a version with a relatively serious story as an option.

Regarding NES and Famicom games, there are examples like Power Blade being overwhelmingly better as an action game [than Power Blazer], or The Adventure of Link being harder but more complete, but we didn’t touch any of the core parts of the game like its difficulty or design.

Is it true that the physical special edition of Estique for the Switch will include an exclusive "score attack" level? What inspired that stage?

It was originally planned to be included in the ported version, but the publisher decided not to include it. So the score attack version comes as a cartridge in the Nintendo Switch special edition package. You can consider the content to be equivalent to the Gunhed Special Version [a rare score-attack version of Gunhed, aka Blazing Lazers].

You recently announced Estique 2 and showed some preview footage of a level set in Giza in 1235 B.C. Will the sequel involve time travel?

We're imagining an atmosphere similar to Time Soldiers or the anime series Yattodetaman.

Will Estique 2 carry over characters from the original game? Some of the bosses and supporting cast are seen very seldom in the first Estique.

Some minor enemies and the basic system will be reused, but bosses and stages will be new.

What was the inspiration for the name of Cat Hui Trading?

From the film director and actor Michael Hui.

Is the cat mascot, Maruino, meant to look like Randar from Compile games?

I asked Satoshi Fujishima, who created Randar, to "draw a 1UP character for a certain game," and what he came up with ended up unused, so we just repurposed it for our company.

You’re a devoted collector of old games, and you worked at the retailer Beep Shop for many years. What changes have you seen in game collecting over the last 10 to 15 years? What do you think of prices going up on rare games?

As for arcade boards, overall prices peaked in 2024 and have dropped a bit since, so I don’t think they’ll just keep going up. If prices get too high, fewer people will buy, so the market price will likely drop to some extent.

What is your favorite old-school Compile shooter?

Gun-Nac.

Little Things: Changeable Guardian Estique

Changeable Guardian Estique took an interesting path. It’s now available on all modern systems, but it came out in 2024 as an actual Famicom and NES game. It was engineered to run on that ancient console at the back of your closet (or perhaps the one still parked under your TV), and for that alone its intense bullet storms and pixel backdrops were visually impressive. Yet beyond that it’s a great little shooter, and my review says as much.

    

I’ll also talk a little about Estique’s story, what basic material it is. Yes, I am one of those nerds who takes every narrative at least a little seriously, even if it’s the plot of an MST3K-featured movie or a single sentence in a video game, and Estique has at least a few sentences and some characters. 

The pilots of the world-saving Estique mecha are Mary and Kanon, both designed with modern anime flourishes. Kanon wears maidlike attire and Mary prefers a sparing getup similar to Rika’s in Phantasy Star IV, with neither outfit seeming practical for extended time in a robot’s cockpit. Such realism is hardly the point, of course, so I initially wrote off the characters as pandering decor for Estique’s side-scrolling shooter spectacle. Hey, you gotta sell your game. 

Yet they won me over. Estique’s creators, including director Takayuki Komabayashi and Compile veteran Dagattai Kodama, wanted their shooter to make impressions across the board, and there’s a little joke in its plot. The NES version has deliberately awkward English text and a simplified plot about alien invasions, while the Famicom version gets into slightly more detail with Mary and Kanon, particularly in an ending with some romantic tension between them. How Estique would have scandalized the Nintendo censors of 1991.

The plot variations are a cute extra, but I was more amused by the images that pop up between levels. Each stage takes place in a different city, and after defeating the resident giant mechanical boss, Mary and Kanon enjoy the local sights and fashions. While I have no doubt that this was motivated by some desire to dress the heroines as biergarten waitresses, it’s surprisingly innocuous overall, as though Mary and Kanon are sharing their vacation photos.

They sometimes even hang out with the enemy pilots of the giant mecha they face. Heck, everyone shows up at the end of the game for a party, apparently freed from whatever evil forces were possessing then. I trust I’m not spoiling anything. Estique isn’t that sort of game.

It’s a soundly charming detail, though I admit some disappointment that the New York level had Mary and Kanon cavorting at the beach. It’s perhaps a reference to GG Aleste 3’s endings, but I had hoped the game would trot out stereotypical Americanisms with the two pilots wearing football uniforms, serving up giant cheeseburgers, and voting against their best interests. New York City isn’t really known for its beaches, either.

Then again, Estique also shows New York City with spacious canyons and prairie sunsets in its background, so perhaps this is a world radically altered. 

Anyway, I recommend Changeable Guardian Estique to anyone who enjoys shooters. I also recommend buying it legitimately. That should go without saying, but the developers were concerned enough to make this.

So I think it bears emphasizing.

The Way of Wall Scrolls

I became an anime nerd in the late 1990s, and it wasn't a bad time for that. There's a lot to analyze there: the rise of manga and anime as a mass-market export from Japan, the expensive or haphazard ways fans acquired it, and the backlash from more entrenched geek circles. Yet if I had to describe my young and silly anime-fan period in one phrase, I'd refer to that time as My Wall Scroll Years. 

Wall scrolls are still a popular chunk of the anime merchandise market, but I remember them looming largest around the turn of the century, if you can call it that without sounding ancient and weird. As the 1990s drew to a close, fans snapped up all sorts of products based on their favorite anime, even when those products were overpriced or unlicensed or not even visually comprehensible.

 

In many respects, wall scrolls of that period were questionable purchases. The quality of the print on fabric was rarely as nice as an actual poster, and their appeal was mostly in how easily they could hang on a wall. I had a bunch of them for a while, but in time I realized that if I was going to display my nerd proclivities so readily, I should at least use framed posters. Before that revelation dawned, however, I was perfectly willing to decorate with wall scrolls of my favorite anime or video games. I recall three of them most vividly, along with the reactions they received...or didn’t. 

AN EVANGELION FAMILY PHOTO 

I suspect that most of the wall scrolls I owned were not officially licensed products, but one was the real deal: a Neon Genesis Evangelion scroll that I bought during a college trip to Japan. The art was the same as the image below, but the design I had featured the show’s title instead of the odd photo-negative of the characters.

I liked the simplicity of it, how it made Evangelion look like some legal drama or a mystery anthology about a teenage detective. Evangelion was, I reasoned, all about the characters, and I preferred how this piece was free of EVA Units, plugsuits, or any bizarre imagery. This was a time when festooning your wall with any nerd décor was asking for trouble, but I found this Evangelion spread tasteful. I approved of how Shinji looms largest, how Misato is lost in thought, and how Asuka, the abusive time bomb who livens up the show, looks completely happy. 

Notable Reaction: 

One of my housemates looked at Misato and, noticing her cross necklace, asked “Is she a nurse?” 

I could have pointed out that Misato Katsuragi is not in fact a nurse but rather an officer of NERV, a mysterious organization whose clandestine, world-altering machinations she gradually deduces as she struggles to protect the mentally unstable teenage pilots under her charge while reconnecting with her openly double-agent college boyfriend and awkwardly reconciling the survivor’s guilt she has from witnessing the horrific Second Impact that killed her scientist father and billions of other people. 

But I just said, “Nah, she’s a military commander.” 

DARKSTALKERS 

It took me a while to properly appreciate Darkstalkers, but I was hooked by the time Vampire Savior (aka Darkstalkers 3) arrived on home systems in 1998. I decided to get the superior Sega Saturn version, and I noticed that Game Cave, which by then was filling a dozen pages in every issue of GameFan, offered the game with a wall scroll showing art from the Darkstalkers anime series. So I called them up and ordered it, which was actually what you often did before you decided that credit cards were safe on the Internet.

I suspect that this wall scroll was not officially licensed, given that Game Cave had no scruples about selling those ubiquitous Son May anime CD bootlegs alongside legitimate goods. Yet I didn’t care when I could play Vampire Savior on my Saturn and hang Morrigan and Demitri on my wall. It made up for the Darkstalkers anime series and the Darkstalkers cartoon being disappointments in completely different ways. 

Notable Reaction: 

It wasn’t long before my relentlessly Catholic mother walked into my room, saw that giant illustration of Morrigan in all her bat-winged succubus splendor, and gasped in surprise. I rolled my eyes and prepared for criticism. 

“Look what he put on his wall!” She said, clearly elated. “He’s not gay after all!” 

My mother left the room, rapt as a pilgrim at Lourdes, before I could ask any questions or vent any admonitions about her prejudices. She was correct in her assumptions, but I was shocked that she’d needed an anime wall scroll as proof. Even so, it was rare that my parents showed any interest, much less any approval, toward my anime or video game habits, so I decided to count this as a small victory.

If only that Darkstalkers wall scroll had featured Felicia, the series mainstay who usually wears nothing but very selective fur. I’m sure my mother would have been glad to learn that the nearly naked cat-woman on my wall was, judging by Vampire Savior’s endings, also a nun and therefore a Nice Catholic Girl.

SATOSHI URUSHIHARA’S CHUN-LI 

I always liked Chun-Li. It was less an awkward preteen crush and more of a fondness for her as a character, a resilient woman who held her own in Street Fighter and the frequently male-dominated realm of fighting games. Yes, Chun-Li was designed and marketed to entice an equally male-dominated market, but I sought the higher ground. That extended to a wall scroll.

This art is the work of Satoshi Urushihara, who is hardly a Puritan when it comes to drawing women for games like Growlanser and Langrisser or his original creations like Plastic Little and Legend of Lemnear. He made several illustrations of Chun-Li, and this was the one I liked best. I enjoyed the contrast between her tearful background expression and her more confident foreground pose, and I preferred her Street Fighter Alpha outfit to her less practical original acrobat costume. I even appreciated that while Chun-Li is often rendered with large thighs and skinny arms, Urushihara allowed her a bulkier upper body and thus a more balanced physique, portraying an image of strength layered atop vulnerability. 

Yes, I had thought about this wall scroll. I had analyzed it. I was prepared to defend it and extol its artistic merits to anyone who noticed and remarked on it. 

Notable Reaction: 

No one noticed or remarked, actually. All my rationalizations went to waste, probably because Chun-Li wasn’t on my wall for long. 

You see, I was a weird contradiction of a nerd. I was willing to wallpaper my dorm room with Masamune Shirow art and RPG posters, yet I would never, ever actually discuss anime or video games with others unless I was rock-certain that they were as into it as I was. It's not as though I would raise my hand in my History of Art class and announce that I had an artistically semi-nude Chun-Li on my wall. This was many years before Nicki Minaj’s song, after all. 

Eventually that socially uptight half of me triumphed, and most of those wall scrolls, Chun Li among them, were stored away while I tried to balance a few anime or video-game posters with Radiohead, Tori Amos, or Mulholland Drive. 

Like many things I valued as a young anime nerd, my wall scrolls were swiftly sold when I needed money more than a tapestry of awkwardly positioned Xenogears artwork. I don’t really miss them, and I’m not even sure if I even miss that time in my life when I’d spend money recklessly just to show the world how much I liked Evangelion or Darkstalkers or Chun-Li. I can do that much cheaper right here.

I'm no longer embarrassed about being an anime nerd, yet I'm also no longer driven to cover my living space so heavily in such adornments. I can say with matchless confidence that My Wall Scroll Years are far behind me. 

Uh oh. 

Guilty Gear: Gear Be Dragons

I have always enjoyed Guilty Gear. As irrelevant a claim as it is, I was indeed there when the first game hit back in 1998, and I immediately adored Guilty Gear’s rough and glorious excess, its devotion to heavy-metal anime gaudiness as an art form. Later titles were far more polished, but the original has that earnest, almost furious aura that comes from someone throwing everything they have into a creation. You can see that all over the game. It’s in the striking intro, the catchy soundtrack, the inventive characters, and, of course, the memorable backgrounds. 

Like all things Guilty Gear, the stages grew more absurd and detailed with each game, and yet the original has plenty to see. The series unfolds in a shattered future where artificial creatures called Gears run rampant, and in this mélange of civilized pockets and rampant wastelands, just about anything goes.

 

For example, it’s neat how the militarized backdrop of the hulking soldier Potemkin’s homeland has mecha units worthy of their own model kits…

…Or how the temple favored by American ninja (and future president) Chip Zanuff combines giant tengu masks with what seems to be a warped cybernetic Avalokitesvara statue.

Yet I want to discuss the aged knight Kliff Undersn’s recurring combat scene, known as the Grave in official Guilty Gear documentation. Its centerpiece is a giant dragon carcass, but note the smaller lizards frolicking among its decay. Perhaps scavengers or some lesser genus of dragon themselves, they observe the combat and sometimes pause to clean themselves like rabbits. They apparently harbor no ill sentiment toward Kliff and his offensively named Dragonslayer sword.

Those small dragons reappear in this stage in subsequent games, looking slightly sharper to fit the more polished look, and they even gather around fires and take to the air on stubby, aerodynamically insufficient wings. Look, Guilty Gear has a character whose wings are a quarreling angel and grim reaper. Chubby reptiles taking flight is a low-rung implausibility. 

Yet it’s their initial appearance that intrigues me most. The first Guilty Gear packs a lot into an original hand-drawn PlayStation fighter, and it had a difficult production. While creator Daisuke Ishiwatari and Team Neo Blood initially made the game with rendered sprites as in Killer Instinct, they scrapped that prototype, redesigned many of the characters, and started over with sprite artwork. And they still found time to animate some capering reptiles for the dragon-corpse level. 

It’s this sort of thing that wins me over, perhaps even more than Guilty Gear’s constant sense of overkill, the countless compelling details in the animation, the extensive backstories, or the subplots about Axl’s neglected girlfriend or Millia’s unfortunate fanboy.

The dragonlings are not in the nighttime version of the Grave seen in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R (actual title). Their campfires are out, suggesting that they’re diurnal or crepuscular in their activities. Or maybe they’re Kliff’s pets and he’s conscientious enough not to let them roam in the deep of the night. Given how vast Guilty Gear’s worldbuilding can be, maybe there’s an entire novel available only in Japan and devoted to Kliff’s life and times, including his complex relationship with various dragon species. 

I have not seen these dragons in more recent Guilty Gear titles, but then Kliff isn’t in those games either. It could be that the critters lurk somewhere in a background and are just hard to spot in the rapid complexities of Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- and Guilty Gear: Strive and whatever other forms the series takes. It’s hard to keep track sometimes, but for me it’s always worth the trouble.

Farewell to Forums: Digital Press

The Digital Press forums are gone. This may not seem important or even shocking to those unfamiliar. After all, forums are a relic of the old Internet, a discussion venue long since outpaced by speedier forms of social media. Many message boards are now lost to the ages, and that’s just the way of progress. Yet the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable is a loss worth noting.

 

For starters, it was one of the first message boards where I regularly hung out. I joined around 2002, not long after the forums were established (though the Digital Press fanzine dates all the way back to 1991). The forums attracted a mix of older and younger fans, veterans who remembered the Atari days mingling with folks younger than the Sega Genesis. It was my introduction to the staples of a busy forum: the in-jokes and feuds and gimmicks and contests and meltdowns and drama and moderator squabbles and the occasional threats of real-life physical assault over differing opinions on Springer or Darius Twin. 

I miss it in some ways. Today’s social media lets us connect with others quickly and conveniently, but that immediacy is its own cost. I liked the way the Retrogaming Roundtable was never too big. I could log in once or twice a day without the risk of missing out on anything, and I could take time to compose a post without fretting over wordcount limits. It was a place where, to borrow that myth of small-town Americana, everyone knew everyone. And sometimes hated them. 

Beyond any personal connection, the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable had a lot of useful information. Industry veterans would occasionally pop in with stories, and technical questions invariably attracted people who knew what they were talking about. It was a place for diving into the obscure, whether it was uncovering Micronics’ covertly programmed titles or finding out if certain Sega CD and 32X games ever saw official releases. And those subjects aren’t as obscure these days, now that retro-game collecting has wider scope and higher prices. 

Like most forums, Digital Press declined as the 2010s arrived and everyone migrated to Twitter, Facebook, and other venues. The forums chugged on, kept afloat under new management, but I only stopped by on occasion. Sometimes I wasn’t in the best of moods, as I was disdainful of game collecting and other nerd passions for what I now realize were silly reasons. At the time I honestly didn't care if I got banned, but now I'm glad I didn't.

It seems that the forums are backed up, though a searchable database might not emerge. I’ll miss those occasions where I went looking for some ancient scrap of video-game history and found it on an old Digital Press thread where I’d actually posted many years ago. There’s a lot of valuable information there, so I’m glad it’s preserved somehow. 

I did little to help that, I’m afraid. For all of the unique material contained on those forums, the only posts I saved were a few that amused me. Perhaps I can wring some meaning from them. 

A lot of Digital Press chatter started off with someone needing help in getting past a boss or a puzzle. Forum user “grape,” however, perhaps had other motivations.

Well, sure, but why are the boots so important?

Uh…

You don’t say. 

Threads like this made me realize something: for just about every character in video games (and perhaps all fiction) there’s at least one obsessed fan. Sometimes those fans are just fascinated by a humble enemy’s design or a shopkeeper’s mannerisms. Sometimes they’re innocently sympathetic to a memorable character with a small role. And sometimes they’re just unabashed pervs.  

I met plenty of cool people through the forums, and one of them was the artist known as Bratwurst. He’s made all sorts of great comics, illustrations, and technical wonders (and my site’s banner), and his forum antics always amused me. This one still makes me burst out laughing.

Perhaps Kaine was naïve to assume that any old video games would remain on store shelves for long, but this was an era when such things were in lower demand. Thrift shops and flea market vendors might have bins full of old NES or Sega games for a few bucks each, with future high-ticket rarities like Wild Guns and M.U.S.H.A. just sitting there unwanted.  

In recent years the Retrogaming Roundtable’s traffic was low enough that some members realized they could post incoherent rants without many people mocking or challenging them. Some of these diatribes were about video games, but other posts had a lot bubbling below the surface.

Nostalgia drove a lot of the discussion on Digital Press, yet it often showed how nostalgia leads to more interesting matters: historical studies, debunking an idealized past, humorous anecdotes, and even personal growth. Yet it’s easy to sink thoughtlessly into that pool, and the above nostalgia-poisoned ramble shows just what happens when you never shake the myth that everything was better simply because you were young and not required to think too much about anything. I believe the person who posted that thing was banned for it, and I hope he gets help. 

If there’s any real lesson here, it’s that you might want to save interesting things you find on message boards. The Internet’s a fragile thing, after all, and there’s no guarantee that something you like will stick around. It’s not exactly fair, but hey. Them’s the breaks.  

Little Things: Whip Rush

What follows is my attempt to talk about Whip Rush and only Whip Rush. I will deliberately avoid mentioning its connections to Trouble Shooter. Instead I’ll just focus on Whip Rush, the 1990 Sega Genesis shooter developed by Vic Tokai. This isn’t an easy task. 

That’s because there isn’t much to say about Whip Rush. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s very much a middle-grade shooter from an age when its kind swarmed the market. Notably reminiscent of Irem’s R-Type, this is a standard side-scrolling affair (with occasional vertical interludes) where the player controls a cute little spaceship called Whip Rush and two accompanying weapon pods. There are lasers, missiles, fireballs, cityscapes, enemy bases, organically pulsating tunnels, and all the other expected sights of nearly every shooter from the early 1990s.

 

You’ll see glimmers of invention in a few boss battles, yet there is no elevating Whip Rush. It’s an unremarkable specimen of its day, harsh in the least compelling fashion. Surviving the levels depends entirely on powering up your weapons and keeping them: one hit demotes you to a pea-shooter and all but seals your fate. Perhaps an easier game would have gone down better, or perhaps that would have given it even less staying power. 

Is that all there is to Whip Rush? Hmm...well, there’s something I like about the opening.

One cliché that I always enjoy at least a little is the mysterious disappearance of some exploratory vessel, whether it’s a high-seas clipper or, as Whip Rush introduces, a trio of deep-space ships dispatched to discover new worlds. The mission is deemed “missing and presumed lost” five years into their journey, and their last transmission sees them approaching the planet Voltegus.

But hang on a second. The game then tells us that “less than a week after the incident” an ominous alien force arrives to attack Earth. So those three ships were listed as MIA within a week of losing contact? That seems hasty. What if their communication relays shorted out? What if their lone tech-department wizard was on vacation? What if they just got lazy and didn’t feel like sending those control freaks back at Earth updates about every incremental piece of their voyage? 

Anyway, this is as much storyline as Whip Rush gets. It doesn’t even show an anime pilot at the controls of its ship. Even so, it's a shooter that's worth trying for a few minutes, I guess. Maybe you'll even stick with until the second stage, when you get to that underwater part where everything slows down. That's where it gets dull. 

Okay, fine. I’ll talk about Trouble Shooter. Whip Rush is notable for me only because of its connections to Vic Tokai’s next offering in the genre, known as Trouble Shooter in North America and Battle Mania in Japan. Whip Rush’s staff included Fujito Takada, a.k.a. Takayan the Barbarian, and in a Shmuplations-translated interview he mentions how he was the programmer for Whip Rush while the design was handled by someone else. 

It’s not hard to see Trouble Shooter growing out of Whip Rush. They’re similar in their approaches, mixing horizontal and vertical scrolling, and the available weapons and sound effects all seem from a similar source. 

Yet they’re exceedingly different where it counts. Whip Rush is unobtrusive and mediocre in appearances, while Trouble Shooter has personality at every turn, peppering widespread anime-heroine hyperdestruction with all sorts of tidbit references from whatever Takayan happened to like. It’s also a much easier game, more concerned with colorful details and large characters than it is with how long it might take the average player to reach the ending. 

The Whip Rush ship appears in Trouble Shooter, toting power-ups for protagonists Madison and Crystal (or Mania and Maria) to collect. It’s entirely appropriate for a spacecraft that always looked a little too compact and cuddly for a blistering space shooter. I like to think that Madison and Crystal adopted it as a pet, much like Nanmo from Dirty Pair. I have to mention Dirty Pair at least once in my Trouble Shooter writeups, lest anime fans think me ignorant of the debt that just about everything with futuristic gun-slinging women and copious explosions owes to Kei and Yuri. 

Battle Mania Daiginjoh, sequel to Trouble Shooter, goes with a sleeker ship for its power-up deliveries. Is it a guest star from another Vic Tokai game, or perhaps a reference to another shooter from a rival company, like Technosoft’s Thunder Force? Or is it just a glimpse of how the Whip Rush ship might have been upgraded for a sequel it never had? 

No Vic Tokai game is getting a sequel these days. While Tokai Communications still exists, they’ve long since left the game industry, and their catalog seems off-limits for reissues and new creations. If that ever changes, Whip Rush would not be my first choice for a follow-up, but perhaps its ship could sneak into a third Trouble Shooter game.

Mariner's Run: A Sea Dog Sighting

You know what I always like discussing? Well, yes, Trouble Shooter. Oh, and Gravity Rush too. And don’t get me started about Angel Cop. I could go on for days. 

However, I also enjoy talking about canceled stuff: games and movies and other creations that never saw the light of day. And it’s especially fascinating when those projects are effectively finished and qualify as lost media. That’d be actual lost media, the sort that is possibly gone forever, and not just something that you can’t find on YouTube or the Internet Archive after an intense eleven-second search. 

Mariner’s Run, or Sea Dog in Japan, might be one of these. It’s a rare sort of genre-hybrid video game, mixing an RPG with oceanic explorations. Vic Tokai announced it for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Famicom in 1991, and screenshots appeared in a few publications. It was to follow The Krion Conquest (Magical Doropie in Japan) on release schedules, but Vic Tokai decided to join those companies pulling out of the Famicom/NES market once it was clear that the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were taking over. Cowards, all of them. 

So Mariner’s Run was canceled everywhere, leaving behind some vague descriptions, a few images, and speculation about whether or not it was even finished. Games from the NES era had short development times, remember, so it wasn’t out of the question that a completed and market-ready title would get the axe.

 

Well, Mariner’s Run at least existed as a working game. Here’s some very brief footage of it running at what was probably an exhibition in Japan, as the game has the title of Sea Dog. We get short glimpses of a ship navigating ocean depths, plus artwork of a half-cute mecha-submarine with arms, a missile-launching mouth, and a helmet that Metroid’s Samus Aran might have worn. 

I’ve mentioned Mariner’s Run before, and I still think it’s among the most interesting unreleased and as-yet-undiscovered NES games, right up there with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey. For one thing, it has few direct relatives. The blend of submarine expeditions and RPG features sounds unique; the aquatic dives were apparently side-view action, while the other half of the game involved wandering towns with an overhead view. There are other games with similar mixes, including Deep Sea Adventure on the PlayStation, but there was nothing like this on the NES back in 1991. 

I wish I could credit whoever shared that video on Twitter back in 2022, but the account no longer exists. I saved it at the time and uploaded it to YouTube just this month, so let me know if you’re the one who originally posted this video…or the person who shot the footage in the first place.

At least I can properly credit this clearer scan of a Mariner’s Run screenshot. It was posted by Frank Cifaldi of The Video Game History Foundation, and it shows one of the few known images of the game in welcome detail. We can see the layout of a town that the player would visit to…um… 

Wait. Is that shopkeeper a dog?

 

Perhaps it’s just a trick of the pixels, but that looks like an apron-clad merchant with the head of a dog or possibly a cat. Yes, an actual sea dog in Sea Dog. While it might just be a typical white-bearded vendor (as implied by another, blurry town screenshot I discussed before), the figure has a wide grin and an actual nose that none of the other human townspeople possess. One of the neater elements of Mariner’s Run is the implication that it takes place in some futuristic world of rising ocean levels and lost technologies, and perhaps mutant animal-people were part of that mix. 

Even if I’m wrong and Mariner’s Run possessed a more mundane setting, I’d keep calling it a standout among unreleased video games. Vic Tokai has a very intriguing catalog, from Clash at Demonhead to those Trouble Shooter games I always bring up, and a submarine RPG would fit right in there. So I hope we’ll one day find Mariner’s Run or Sea Dog or whatever else it might have been called. It would show the world a promising, perhaps unfairly canceled game. Or at least it would solve the mystery of that shopkeeper.

Emerald Dragon: Updates and Cows

I wasn’t planning on returning to Emerald Dragon quite so soon, but I’ve seen two important developments. One is a complete fan translation of the PC Engine version, which is my favorite incarnation of good ol’ Emerald Dragon. Released by Stargood, it covers the entire game and even enables the debug mode’s helpful features. The translator’s notes also go into extensive detail about the various Zoroastrian terms that the game appropriates and how complicated it was to trace some of them. Good on them for not going the easy 1990s route and just renaming Atrushan and Tamryn (or Tamrin) to Alvin and Tammy.

 

The translators are also blunt about not being too fond of the game, which is refreshing in contrast to official localizations for which the staff are seldom allowed critical comment. I disagree with such opinions, of course, but they nonetheless make clear that Emerald Dragon is an RPG of a certain era and, more importantly, a certain fashion. That’s part of why I like it. 

Anyway, the translation patch is a good excuse for me to play through the PC Engine version again, And hey, if an unofficial English version of the game popped up a month after I finally wrote about Emerald Dragon, perhaps something else will emerge when I mention it again. 

The second major Emerald Dragon development: I noticed that one of the enemies turns into a cow.

 

You see, all of the foes in Emerald Dragon briefly flash when damaged. So what happens when Atrushan strikes this skull-faced creature, who looks as grim and menacing as you can be when you’re about three square centimeters worth of pixels?

 

It turns pale and looks like a stupefied cow. Perhaps this is entirely by accident, but I like the idea of a graphic designer noticing this back around 1994, having a chuckle, and deciding not to change it. 

In fact, that strikes me more fondly now than ever. As the new year dawns we face a world where a lot of alleged entertainment is vomited out by soulless corruptions of artificial intelligence, to the point where we might doubt even the genuine creations. It’s enough to tilt me toward older books and movies and music and video games, all free of such uncertainties. I can rest assured that yes, an actual human crafted that momentarily bovine monster in Emerald Dragon.

Emerald Dragon: A Magnificent Cut

He’s a dragon. She’s a human. They’re in love. 

That’s not all there is to Emerald Dragon, but it’s the initial hook for this undervalued RPG from Glodia and Right Stuff. True, it was perhaps destined for strictly cult-favorite honors. A following accrued in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but unlike other RPGs it never saw a sequel, never grew into a proper series, never had its own middling two-part anime OVA, and never enjoyed an official release anywhere but Japan. There are worse fates for a game, but Emerald Dragon deserved more attention back then. And despite the wear of a few decades, it deserves that today.

 

Emerald Dragon arises in grim circumstances: in an ancient era, the continent of Ishban fell under a curse that gruesomely infected and killed any dragon within its borders. The survivors fled to a remote isle and founded a dragon settlement of Dragulia, while humans prospered and dominated the mainland. One day a ship wrecks off the coast of Dragulia, and the only survivor is a human girl named Tamryn*. She lives among the dragons and befriends a youngster named Atrushan, but upon growing up she decides to return to Ishbahn and her own kind. Amid a tearful farewell Atrushan snaps off one of his dragon horns and gives it to Tamryn, telling her to summon him if she’s ever in need. Not so long after her departure, Atrushan hears the horn. With help from a local artifact, he finds a way to turn himself human, thus allowing him to visit Ishban and work out his feelings for a woman not of his species. 

Atrushan and Tamryn are a straightforward couple, despite the lingering problem of dragon-human romance simmering between them, and the game introduces the flirtatious prince Hathram and his justifiably irritated friend Farna as a tempestuous counterpoint to the more established low-key affection between the leads. While there’s a quest filled with magical trinkets and evil overlords and eldritch terrors, it’s really all driven by the characters in their interactions and arcs. Even the more sedate party members like the archer Yaman or the elderly wizard Bagin have their own quirks and secrets, and their various exchanges and bickerings enliven a standard plot, much like a Tales RPG or the original Lunar: The Silver Star. Yes, there’s a villain named Ostracon rampaging all over with his monstrous hordes, but that can wait until Hathram and Farna settle a spat over him masking the pressures of royalty under a playboy façade.

 

Many RPGs of the late 1980s stuck to familiar Dragon Quest menus and turns, but Emerald Dragon stretched to more interesting extents. Battles unfold on a field where allies and foes roam and attack as freely as their energy allows, inviting strategy when it comes to positioning party members and judging their range. While the encounters are random, the better versions of the game pace them out well and move everything quick and focused. Characters deliver physical attacks just by running into enemies, similar to an Ys game, and even the more elaborate spells waste little time. 

This brings out Emerald Dragon’s greatest flaw: the player controls only Atrushan. Despite having a full party of warriors, archers, sorcerers and more, you’re limited to directing Atrushan while the computer handles the rest of the characters. In some versions of the game, only Atrushan and Tamryn seem to gain levels and grow, with the rest of the cast coming off as overpowered long-term guests. It’s a curiously limited choice even by the standards of its era, and it hampers what’s otherwise an enjoyable break from RPG combat of this vintage.

 

Emerald Dragon elevates itself in other ways. The character art by Akihiro Kimura is striking in both the designs and the cutscenes. The story has some intriguing little references, with many names derived from Persian myths and Zoroastrianism. The soundtrack hits the usual RPG themes well, and its recurring main anthem is sweeping and catchy. In many respects Emerald Dragon plays it safe as a typical RPG, with anime heroes and familiar beats, and yet there’s always a quality above the norm, a compelling tone in the characters and their adventure. 

And that’s what it comes down to, doesn't it? Video games, and RPGs in particular, can get away with a lot if the story lands right with you. One could quibble over the literary merits of everything from Earthbound to Ephemeral Fantasia, but a narrative doesn’t have to be a masterwork of subtext and eloquence; it just has to draw you in and make you care about the characters. That’s what fed the followings for many revered RPGs of the 1990s, and if you want one lesser-known game that should have stood among them, I’d point to Emerald Dragon. 

This would be the best-known creation of Glodia, one of a number of short-lived developers that broke off from Telenet Japan in the 1980s. They helped bring Emerald Dragon to various computers: the PC-8801 and PC-9801, the MSX, and the X68000. Glodia’s original vision of Emerald Dragon is best on the FM Towns, retaining the same plot, static cutscenes, and that odd feature of many old RPGs: a constant sidebar that shows your party status. Some folks must have liked that. 

There’s a noticeable divide between those older incarnations and the later console versions. In 1994, Emerald Dragon appeared on the PC Engine CD, courtesy of Hudson Soft, Alfa System, and Right Stuff—the last of these being a developer founded by former Glodia staff like Kimura and Emerald Dragon’s scriptwriter and designer Atushi Ii.  And it emerged as a slightly different game.

 

I find that the PC Engine version is Emerald Dragon at its finest. The cutscenes are lavish and dramatic (or melodramatic, if you prefer), the soundtrack is crisp and thunderous, and the characters all benefit from quality vocal performances. The game dispenses with that ubiquitous sidebar and lets players wander the seamless overworld in smoother fashion, and there’s just a greater sense of scale and grandeur. 

The Super Famicom was Emerald Dragon's final stop. This port does its best to evoke its PC Engine counterpart, but the constraints of a cartridge leave it without a CD-based title's cinematic scenes and music (at best you’ll hear a few spoken lines). It’s an easier version of the game as well, and fans sometimes disparage it as watered down in both story and atmosphere.

 

That said, the Super Famicom's Emerald Dragon is still a neat RPG when taken on its own merits. The streamlined narrative leaves the important details intact, the character conversations are amusing, and the combat’s still fast and not too frequent. A "Dragon Change" mechanic allows Atrushan more opportunities to switch forms, and the battle sprites are larger and more animated than those in the PC Engine version. The Super Famicom release was also the only Emerald Dragon to be fully translated by fans for a good while, though the PC Engine version recently got the same treatment.  

How would Emerald Dragon have fared outside of Japan decades ago, anyway? North American fans of RPGs often complained about how seldom they were localized, but at least they had most of the heavy hitters in some form: Final Fantasy, Lunar, Ys, Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest, and even Lufia were all represented, however sporadically. In such a climate Emerald Dragon might have joined that crowd, particularly through its PC Engine edition. The TurboGrafx-16 and TurboDuo (Western versions of the PC Engine and its CD evolution) never had a proper top-tier RPG localized: the Ys games were action-oriented, and Cosmic Fantasy 2, amusing as it was, wasn’t quite an A-lister. Emerald Dragon could have been to the TurboDuo what Lunar: The Silver Star was to the Sega CD: an engrossing, anime-styled quest that stood among the best games on the system.

 

It’s a shame that Emerald Dragon is now among those unfortunate and unappreciated games without any modern reissues. It’s possible that the legal rights are a mess, considering all of the companies involved in its various ports; neither Glodia nor Right Stuff survived the 1990s, and their catalogs seem largely off-limits. Fortunately, that didn’t stop Akihiro Kimura from continuing Emerald Dragon in doujinshi form. His comic series After the End follows Atrushan, Tamryn, and the other characters’ further adventures, and it’s all well-drawn and entertaining for fans of the series. Kimura went further with Elemental Dragoon, a crowdfunded audio drama and RPG with undeniable stylistic ties to Emerald Dragon and Right Stuff’s Alnam series. Meanwhile, Atsushi Ii directed Natural Doctrine, a divisively difficult RPG that I’ll one day have to search for possible Emerald Dragon callbacks. 

If you’ll pardon yet another cliché from me, Emerald Dragon has that certain something. Dissected and analyzed, it seems formulaic among Japan’s unlocalized 16-bit RPGs, never as uniquely absurd as Tengai Makyo, as bizarre as Linda3, or as memorably ghoulish as Last Armageddon. Yet there’s a vitality to its characters, a gleam in the graphics, and brisk enjoyment even within its limited battles. It’s an RPG of the purest romantic incarnation, and there’s always a place for that. And there’s always a reason to lament that it never got a real chance at the entire world. 

(*At the very least, I’d like an official English version to lay down the proper spellings of the characters' names. I’m going along with the fan translation of the Super Famicom version here, but the official guides and artbooks favor various spellings like Atorshan, Thamrin, Husrum, Falna, and so forth.)

Vice: Project Doom's Laser Whip

You won’t catch me saying many unkind things about Vice: Project Doom. It’s one of the best side-scrolling action games on the NES, and boy howdy, there are a lot of side-scrolling action games on the NES. Programmed by Aicom at the top of their talents, Vice is highly impressive in its crafty level designs, its slick controls, and its steadily scaling sense of trepidation and difficulty. It helps that the story, following officer Quinn Hart’s investigation of mutants and conspiracies, is an entertaining little ride despite the restrictions of old NES cutscenes—and that it refuses to give you a happy ending of any kind.

 

I also enjoy Vice: Project Doom’s tiny details, like a red herring computer chip or the way Quinn’s girlfriend/assistant Christy changes her hair color and sprite look to such an extent across cutscenes that you might even think she’s a completely different character. 

 

I have mentioned my fondness of Vice: Project Doom before, and this time I want to focus on a neat little point of its gameplay: the laser whip. Quinn carries a .44 magnum and grenades, but his stock unlimited weapon is an energy flail. Though short of range, it's quick and can damage enemies for as long as Quinn has it drawn, which means that you can strike foes above and behind you.

 

At a glance you might assume this is just poor hit detection, but Vice: Project Doom is assembled too well elsewhere for that. Look closely, and you'll see that the whip arcs behind and above Quinn for just a frame or two, so you can whack enemies like that biomechanical four-winged toucan without even turning around.

It’s not a feature that immediately jumps out, yet it sets up a lot of interesting strategies in the game, especially when it comes to boss fights and thick enemy swarms. Vice: Project Doom is a fast-paced deal where perfect timing is often necessary and always rewarding. It’s never as tough as a Ninja Gaiden, but it’s just as satisfying when you pull off a pixel-precise jump and slash down both a swooping falcon and a vaulting assassin all in one motion. 

The laser whip is a key part of that. Games like Strider and Shinobi III give the player contrails for their sword strikes, but I rather like how the Vice whip even watches Quinn’s back. The chains wielded by Castlevania’s Belmonts somewhat realistically don’t damage foes until they’re fully extended (at least not on the NES) but Vice: Project Doom isn’t having that. It’s having a flexible lightsaber.

I’d also like to know just how much of Vice: Project Doom grew from The Mafat Conspiracy, the Golgo 13 outing that Aicom developed for the NES. There’s not a lot of specific staff overlap, but Vice really feels like an improved version of Mafat’s genre-straddling attempts. Vice gives its side-view levels smoother controls and smaller, more manageable characters, and its driving stages and first-person shooting galleries are far less awkward. Quinn shows too much emotion to be a Golgo-grade assassin, of course.

Vice: Project Doom didn’t really get its due back in 1991. It had a nice Nintendo Power cover, but the release battled for attention amid everything from Sonic to the Battletoads, and its shelf date was possibly delayed atop all that. In fact, Aicom was even competing against themselves, since Jaleco released their Totally Rad and its bodacious surfer lingo around the same time. Bummer. 

That’s okay, because Vice: Project Doom is enjoying itself these days. It hasn’t seen a fancy re-issue, but it’s easily available on the Switch Online’s NES selection—a nice alternative to paying a relatively hefty chunk for an old cartridge. I can only hope that Vice: Project Doom’s reputation deservedly grows until someone attempts a speedrun where they defeat every enemy with the back end of Quinn’s laser whip. It merits that sort of attention.